The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality is taking comments between now and Sept. 1 on its conditional approval of a Department of Energy request to push the startup of the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit to September 2022.
In March, an executive with contractor Fluor Idaho told the Waste Management Symposia that the site might start commissioning the unit this fall, possibly October, starting with a mixture of 10% radioactive waste and 90% simulant before advancing to a 50/50 mix to ensure all systems work.
The conditional approval drafted by the state Department of Environmental Quality on July 19 said DOE may have until Sept. 30, 2022 to successfully fill the first canister at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) with sodium-bearing waste, which will be converted to a solid, granular form from a liquid.
The state would also grant DOE until Dec. 31, 2022 to fill its first 100 canisters at IWTU. The federal agency said it has already lost about 12 months on the project due to COVID and is likely to see another three months of slippage over the next year.
In a June 28 letter to Natalie Walker, the Hazardous Waste Bureau chief for the state agency, DOE blamed “the onset of the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic,” for missing its June 30 milestone for the first IWTU canister.
The long-delayed facility at the Idaho National Laboratory would have been running by June 30 if not for the coronavirus, DOE said. “We believe it is correct to state that COVID-19 is the sole reason for missing this milestone.”
DOE started implementing precautions aimed at blunting the spread of the virus in March 2020. IWTU has used contact tracing and quarantines for workers with COVID symptoms and for any who had close contact with infected individuals, DOE’s site treatment plan manager, Nicole Hernandez, said in the letter.
Hernandez went on to say that “at times, quarantine procedures have required entire construction crews such as pipefitters, electricians, or system engineers to quarantine for 10 to 14 days.” Managers “estimate 12 months of schedule slip has occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic to date and the IWTU Project continues to evaluate schedule slip on a week-by-week basis,” Hernandez added.
IWTU, which is supposed to treat 900,000 gallons of liquid sodium-bearing waste, was first built in 2012 by then-contractor CH2M-WG Idaho, but the unit never worked as planned. In January, a joint venture led by Jacobs, which acquired CH2M in 2017, will become the new cleanup contractor at Idaho National Laboratory, making it the third team to assume responsibility for the IWTU.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management spent $571 million from December 2006 through April 2012 to build the IWTU, but by February 2019, the agency had doled out almost $1 billion on the project, according to a Government Accountability Office report from two years ago.
The sodium-bearing waste resulted from past spent fuel reprocessing at the Idaho National Laboratory’s Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center, according to DOE.
